Assignment #2 Unintended Consequences of Help With Chores

There are lots of chores to do around the house.  Intuitively, it would seem help from dad to accomplish these chores would be a good thing, but it can actually be counter-productive.  Despite the fact that dad helps with chores, he also tends to break a lot of the equipment he uses to complete the chores, which creates more work for me in the long run.  There are a few feeback loops at work here.  B1 and B2 are both balancing loops in which we both knock out chores.  R1 describes the way dad increases the chore load.  Because everytime he does a chore, he breaks equipement that i have to go back and fix, the chore load actually increases each time the cycle passes.  My only saving grace (because dad feels the need to help whether i want it or not) is that eventaully dad will get frustrated when the equipment breaks and leave the rest for me to do, thus alleviating the broken equipment problem.

Increasing options decreases sales

A large manufacturer (which will remain nameless since this is a public blog) wants to increase its market share of the products it sells (large HVAC equipment).  In order to do this it decides it will increase the number of options it offers on its equipment to give customers extra incentive to purchase that equipment.  Since more options lead to better fit of the product into the customer's requiremnts, and better fit makes the product more cost effective to the customer, it is thought sales will increase. These extra options are release quickly, before being fully engineered, to start bringing in more sales as quickly as possable.  Unfortunately, due to the nature of the equipment and the way it is manufactured, these additional options, not being fully engineered for manufacture, create havoc on the manfuacturing floor.  As a result, the correct parts fail to be ordered and the parts that do arrive get misinstalled or misplaced.  Because of this, the entire line backs up, and the lead time on the product now goes from 8 weeks to 11 weeks.  Because the wait time is longer, customers cannot buy the equipment, even though they desire the features, because they cannot wait that long.  As a result, they purchase stock equipment from a competitor.  The end result is that sales decrease and the options do not get fully engineered because engineering effort is now being put toward getting the factory lead time back down.  Monitoring actual sales vs potential sales over time, we could evalute the impact of increasing the options set. The hard elements would be things like total number of sales of the product, lost sales due to lead time, factory lead time, first pass yield, profit margin, number of missing/unordered parts and total number of available options.  soft elements would be things like customer perception of the company and employee contentment